Zeke replied to my ad to sell a leather Adidas gym bag/case for racquets and three wood squash racquets for $40... "Is this squash or badminton? Can I see pictures of the racquets?"

I replied... "I am glad you asked me for pics of the racquets. When I took them out to take pics, I realized that I had priced the lot FAR below the actual value. I reposted my ad on Kijiji at a higher price with a pic of the racquets. Thanks. BTW, the Wilson Professional was only used in competitions. One Manta Pro Only is the one I used in league and the other one was used only long enough to get the feel of it as it was a backup."

I practiced my bugle! I can now play Reveille, Taps, To the Colors, Retreat, and Cease Fire. The last is especially important as I have yet to find my tuner. I know where I last saw it; for some reason it was hiding in the closet.

The doors are up! The handrail is up! The columns and the house numbers go up tomorrow! Now, if the locksets get in we'll be in great shape and the guy comes for putting aluminum sheathing around the trim, we'll be even better than great shape.

C'mon, Mom. Let's go to the Drunken Lout Tavern and get drunk and eat pickled eggs and embarrass the rest of the family. Maybe the place will be raided again and Amos, who's rich, can make our bail. Just five hundred dollars will set us free. I know, five hundred don't sound like much, but we've got old Amos to touch.

Amos, we're going to have to watch the results and pull together when someone becomes the candidate, but I'm still behind Ms. Clinton - I don't think young voters realize quite what the process is, and just because you state you want things like free college for all that you can just wave a wand and make it happen. Hillary is case hardened when it comes to political battles. And it's time - there hasn't been a more qualified woman candidate to date.

The year of the monkey in China? Aren't they throwing you a parade, Chongo? Why don't you go over there and check it out?

I celebrate good fortune everywhere. Just think what fine and comfortable lives we are living--bathing in hot water, sheltered and warmed, real glass windows, flush toilets, replaceable underwear, buried sewers, padded chairs, finely appointed coaches able to leap the wide plains at over sixty miles per hour, sky-chairs and long distance trains, telephones ands smartphones and chili con carne in tins and fresh fruit year-round and electric lights almost anywhere at all! I swan!

Really, it is SO much better than that time I spent in the 13th century. That was the pits.

Take it easy, my fellow sibs of the glorious Mom. Next week I am going to Nawth Cawrolinah to visit friends. Only they call themselves frayends, natch. I thought frayends were what happened to the folded-over bits at the bottom of your legs.

Being self-aware, I know of no time or space when or where I did not and do not exist everywhere in the multiverse. It follows then I created the multiverse for Reasons Of My Own, which for Reasons Of My Own I chose not to share with the less enlightened.

However, from time to time I will provide a path for those who might understand.

These things you say about yourself are true of all of us, Rap. We all exist in every time and space. Your problem is that you have fallen into the delusion that it only applies to you! (And that you're in charge of all of it.) This, sir, is extreme solipsism on your part and may verge upon megalomania.

What you clearly need is a few simple lessons in humility from Chongo Chimp. He can show you how to appreciate the links you share with the common man (and the common ape), thus returning you to reason and sanity.

Prescriptions for humility from the hands of Little Hawk? Try lessons in subtle diplomacy from Trump, or guidance on penurious living from the Brothers Koch. Chongo has as much wisdom to impart as a two-dollar hooker on payday. And as an embodiment of Little Hawk's psyche one can only face the ineluctable confusion that the peanut gallery has not grown far from the nut. OR something like that.

I am, of course, in no position to talk, myself, being at times loquacious, judgmental, hypercritical, scurrilous, and even pedantic. For all of which I offer my humblest apologies!

Oh? Looks like : Lady Mary Josephine Talbot, née Crawley, (born 1891) is the eldest daughter of Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham. and his American heiress wife Cora Crawley (née Levinson), as well as the mother of the current heir of Grantham, George, whom she had with her late husband Matthew Crawley. Mary has two younger sisters, Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham and Lady Sybil Branson, who later died in 1920 from complications following childbirth. A potential brother was miscarried in 1914. Through Sybil, she is the sister-in-law of Tom Branson and the aunt and godmother of Sybil "Sybbie" Branson. She is also the aunt of her sister Edith's illegitimate daughter, Marigold. She is the granddaughter of the late earl of Grantham and Violet Crawley (through whom she is linked to the MacClare Family) and of Isidore and Martha Levinson. In August 1925, she and Henry Talbot married at the St. Michael and All Angels Church. (http://downtonabbey.wikia.com/wiki/Mary_Talbot)

That would be the lovely... well, in the southern Baptist States that would be the slut.

It is to laugh. I went out with a lass that had attended Bob Jones University for two years. "Hardshell Baptist" as my old man called them. No movies, no dancing, the works. I have never seen such a... er, ahhhhh, enthusiatic woman. I think her favourite hymn was "At The Drop Of A Hat." I dunno if her ultimate goal was to convert a filthy Papist but I really didn't care. I wouldn't mind dating another lass trained at BJU. >;-)

I spent a day strolling along the Pacific shore with a wonderful girl I hadn't seen in fifty plus years--my very first girlfriend. Let me tell you, it is amazing how time suddenly collapses and memories come rushing forward. Swoooosh!

Well, that must have been a wonderful reunion, Amos, giving you both much to think about. The first woman I was seriously interested in was a German-Canadian girl I met in Toronto in 1969. Her name was Helen Klein. We remained lifelong friends, but I am sad to say that she passed away due to cancer a couple of years back. I still have photos of her from way back then. As far as I am concerned, we will meet again, but it will be in another place, not here. In the meantime, I certainly do miss her. And a few others as well.

The painters come tomorrow, and, possibly, the electrician to install the dining room lights. If the electrician doesn't come tomorrow he said he'd be here Thursday.

And during all of this we're trying to pack for a month in Hawai'i. Hawai'i, the nemesis of Sandy Ego. Hawai'i, which has the climate and weather for which SoCal would sell its collective souls. Hawai'i, land of poi and grill encounters. Hawai'i, where James Cook got sauced. And we're leaving Saturday and flying Sunday.

You're going to Hawai'i shortly, Rap? That's great! So is Chongo. He'll be there right at the same time as you, doing a bit of campaigning. Maybe you can get his autograph and meet some of the top people in the APP, schmooze a bit, bask in the reflected glory of the most historically significant candidate since....Lincoln? FDR? George Washington? Rocco Vincenzo?